Free Graphic Novel Paperback Giveaway as a Lead Generator (Part 7)

IDEA NUMBER 7 on how to make paperbacks of my graphic novels free for interested readers.

Beware! Some free offers are too good to be true.

Below are some nightmare scenarios that litter the Internet freebie landscape.

Even if a free offer is not an outright scam, illegal fraud or phishing site, free offers may still wind up wasting a tremendous amount of your precious time and energy… and even money. Many free offers only disclose later (or never) that you are actually required to buy something in order to get the supposed freebie.

Other free offers make you fill out page after page of personal information until you finally come to that piece of personal information you refuse to share (like your credit card number) and quit. But do you really think these sites won’t use the info they’ve already collected from you for free? They like freebies as much or even more than you because they know how to make money from your free info. That’s what data miners do.

(Above link has the actual list of sites. Below is a quote from the forum thread.)

“… most on nearly every forum don’t think (these are ‘legitamate freebies’). It’s the hoops you have to jump through that make them not actually free.

“Here is how they work:

“You click on to sign-up for offer. You get a page with a bunch of offers for which you must click ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to. Once you have done that, you may go through another 2 to five pages like that. Think you are done? Not yet! Even though they say you are almost finished. Now they take you to the ‘silver level page’. You absolutely must click yes to a minimum of number of offers they specify. These are credit card offers, trial subscription to magazines, book clubs, movie clubs, music clubs, or something else.

“Those offers must be completed according to the regulations. You must actually receive the credit card, and/or actually signed-up and paid the fee for the trial membership, to qualify for the freebie. This repeats itself on the next page with the ‘gold offers’, and then on yet another page with the ‘platinum ones’. Each level has requirements that you must meet to get the so-called ‘freebie’, which makes them freebies not at all. In the meantime, you have spent a good portion of your time wading through pages of offers to which you must click ‘yes’ pr ‘no’ to. A half-hour or more for a freebie you may not get anyway.

“By the time you are done, you have signed up, and paid for, various trial-memberships, which you cannot cancel, until the trial is about to expire. And if you forget to cancel during that usual 7-day window they give you, you end up getting billed for membership, because when you signed-up, you authorized them to bill your chosen method of payment. The places you sign-up for, report back to them if you met the requirements for signing up. This can take as long as 6 months. Some never report that you met the requirements. It only takes one affiliate not reporting back, for you to lose out on the freebie. Way too iffy. And you have spent a few dollars or more along the way.

“That’s why many of these are not legitimate freebies. I got a sample from Quality Health when they first started, and I signed up. It took a year to get here. It was a pocket-pack of kleenex tissues. Since then, they have been doing the going through hoops by signing-up for this or that crap. And they spam you like crazy with more hoop jumping offers from their affiliates.

“EDIT to add to the clueless neggers of this post, according to FatWallet’s own FAQ, Quality Health and the others on the list that make you jump hoops, are NOT freebies.”

(Message edited by: SweetClover on 2008-09-24 03:20:53 CDT)

~ Joy Rip

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You’re currently reading “Free Graphic Novel Paperback Giveaway as a Lead Generator (Part 7),” an entry on Joy Rip's Free Graphic Novels Book Club

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Where am I?

Stopping for directions. Looking for leads. Pretending not to be lost on whatever road to happiness, road to success, I think I am on. Just another bumbling broke spoke hawking his dreams / wares / art /... Imaginary wares proclaiming imaginary values to anyone kind or gullible enough to listen, care and perhaps even buy.